Loading summary
Transcript27 lines
- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller. I'm here with my buddy jvl, author of the Triad newsletter, which you should absolutely be subscribing to go to the bullock.com to subscribe to it. We've got some news today out of cbs. More updates. Me and Bill Kristol talked about the latest on Disney's running fold with Donald Trump, where Disney settled with Trump over George Stephanopoulos. And then Trump sent out a bleat over the weekend basically saying that was not enough. You need to settle with me again. So you see what you get on these settlements. Anyway, on the CBS side of the ledger, we have news that CBS News President and CEO Wendy McMahon is stepping down from the network. In a memo to staff, she cited leadership differences, quote, it's become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward. I think we all know what that's all about. But jvl, why don't you paint people a picture?
- [00:49]
jvl
Boy, it's wild, isn't it? So Trump has filed a lawsuit against CBS News in 60 Minutes and Paramount. The allegation being that they ran an interview with Paramount Kamala Harris during the campaign and edited it. The video was edited so that it.
- [01:07]
Tim Miller
Could fit within 60 minutes, which is.
- [01:09]
jvl
In the name of the show, 90 straight minutes of, of just raw footage. They edited it to fit within the confines of a 60 minute television show, which I assume has like, you know, 16 minutes of commercials in it. And anyway, like one of the stupidest things you've ever seen. But of course it's not really a lawsuit. It is legalized and ritualized bribery. Because what happens the parent company, it's a shakedown. The parent company is trying to have a merger, Paramount and Skydance. And this has to be approved by the federal government. And having a ridiculous lawsuit is a way for them to parent pay the person of the president again as a private citizen. They're going to pay him as a private citizen so that he can then direct his government to approve their merger, corporate merger. And, and the best part of it all is that when they settle in the settlement, I assume a non disclosure agreement will be wrapped up inside of all of it. So this is really one of those things where Donald Trump has been an innovator in American life, that he's figured out how to use civil litigation to extort government favors. And honestly, I'm amazed that nobody like invented this before or realized that you could do this. I guess I feel like Ron Burgundy. I can't believe you ate the whole Wheel of Cheese. I'm not even mad. And we had the long time ahead of 60 minutes step down a few weeks ago. And today Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News. And what that tells me is that the resignations are going all the way up the line. And there are two things I want to talk about. Tim.
- [02:54]
Tim Miller
Yeah, we should mention the Bill Owens. Right. So this is the second top. Top resignation, right?
- [02:58]
jvl
That's right. Sorry. Bill Owens had left a couple weeks ago and now Wendy McMahon. First of all, it is interesting to me that private sector executives and producers have more gumption and willingness to resign in protest than elected representatives in the Republican Party. It's kind of something.
- [03:21]
Tim Miller
Or top staffers that are instituting the program. You know, I like, we've seen some career staffers quit from the government, but.
- [03:27]
jvl
Yeah, but not political appointees, right? No, that's really striking. But I wonder how much of CBS News is going to get burned to the ground on the way to this merger. And that's what I'm curious to hear your take on because, I mean, I wonder what will be left. Right. At some point people are going to have to, to, to. Somebody's going to have to say, yes, yes, we'll follow along and do this. And I don't know who it's going to be so far. Cbs, the people at CBS News are being pretty impressive in their gumption and I think they deserve a lot of credit for that.
- [04:03]
Tim Miller
I mean, you could see it going a lot of ways, right? Because so you start from the basis that like linear TV is dying, right? So CBS as a news brand is dying and it's in kind of like even worse shape really than, you know, the other, you know, networks who have like, more spin off opportunities into streaming, you know, into other. Right. Options. And so, you know, so that, so that like decline is happening already. Right. And so then this, all this controversy happening in the context of that. Right. Which is Trump shaking them down apparently successfully as part of this merger. And then assuming this merger actually goes through at this point, there's no reason to not think that this merger will.
- [04:49]
jvl
Go through because Paramount has made clear that they will do whatever it takes.
- [04:54]
Tim Miller
To make it go through. Then on the other side of that, I guess you could imagine a. Okay, all right, we appeased him and now we're gonna go back to business as usual and he's gonna send mean bleeds about us, but he doesn't have any control over us. That's like the best case scenario. Right, but isn't the more likely Scenario that this is just, you know, kind of like any other like hedge fund strip mining of a declining company, you know, for like the remaining assets. Right? Like a private equity, private equity company coming into a, to a business that was already declining and just trying to figure out how to squeeze some dollars out of it on the way out. I mean, I just think that's what CBS ends up looking like, right? Like on the back end of this, which is you cut a ton of the overhead and spending and it is a, you know, not like it's not becomes like a Fox News style mouthpiece, but it just ends up becoming like kind of a toothless, you know, very.
- [05:57]
jvl
Even be in the news business or that. Right. I mean if under the new ownership where what Skydance really wants is Paramount, they're really there for fiction and movies and streaming. They want Paramount plus. And as you say, it's not like NBC where they have msnbc, they have.
- [06:14]
Tim Miller
A whole network peacock, you know, it can be part of a streaming thing.
- [06:18]
jvl
Like this is all they've got. It's just like the CBS News thing, which is like, you know, four different pieces, right? They have a morning show, evening show, then news magazine in the Sunday show. Like at some point, like, I don't know, is it worth the trouble?
- [06:36]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I mean this is where we, you know, it's good. Like I would want to get like Dylan Byers or Max Tanny or something, one of these media reporters in. Because my guess is that it is still like that Those flagship news programs are still making money right now.
- [06:50]
jvl
Yeah, right now.
- [06:52]
Tim Miller
And so I guess you would want to like probably keep them. I don't know, like look, you look at CBS Sunday Morning, right? It's like their soft interview focus show. Like why not just turn all of CBS News into that, right? Nobody's going to be mad at you. Trump's going to be mad. You know, you can do a segment once a quarter on Melania, talks about whatever her interests are, you know, like a BS thing. And then, you know, you'd also have some other soft focus segments on, you know, whatever doctors, you know, coming up with cures to research, going with cures to new diseases or what, you know, I mean, all that kind of stuff. Like why not just turn it all into the that where, you know, you're still getting the revenue and you're not getting the risk. And I just think that seems like to be the obvious direction of what I like where along that spectrum they go, I don't know. But the like investigative, you know, holding the administration and power to account. I mean, it seem, it seems to me that they're checking out of that business at minimum until the merger and maybe forever.
- [07:58]
jvl
Yeah, it's hard to, it's hard to see how you put this stuff back together again. And I want, this is a real question. I wonder if the people at CBS at the highest levels if they understood in 2016 that Donald Trump was an extinction level event for their news division.
- [08:19]
Tim Miller
Of course not the obvious opposite. It was less with cbs. The guy had said it was going to be bad for the country but good for our bottom line. No, of course not. Of course they don't.
- [08:28]
jvl
There's a lesson there, I think.
- [08:31]
Tim Miller
Oh yeah, A real lesson. It's related to all the foreign policy stuff that we're doing right now in the Middle east where everybody's like, oh, we're just going to, if we just change to make the only consideration short term financial interests, if the only thing that we consider is short term financial interest in every deal that we make, then everything will turn out okay. That's the savvy move.
- [08:53]
jvl
Yeah, don't, don't notice that bond rates just went over 5% for the first time since April. Don't worry about the bond market at all.
- [09:00]
Tim Miller
What a fucking world we're in. Jvl, any other final thoughts on CBS from you?
- [09:06]
jvl
I feel very, very bad for all of the real journalists.
- [09:11]
Tim Miller
Me too. I'm glad you made sure because I.
- [09:13]
jvl
Don'T know what, you know, they have real people doing real important work there. Not all of them. Nobody's perfect, but it's a pretty, it's a pretty serious, as these things go. CBS is a pretty serious broadcast network in terms of news and journalism and there are a lot of people there whose livelihoods are threatened and whose jobs are simply going to, as you say, just go away. That stuff is going to stop happening anymore and that's bad for them and it's bad for America.
- [09:38]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I totally agree with that. It is worth saying. And you know, obviously 60 Minutes has done a lot of good stuff, but they do good reporting across the news division there. I mean, a lot of people that are actually doing journalism. But, and, and I do think that I, I don't, I don't think it's an extinction level event like an atomic bomb that's just going to go away. You know, it's just like to me it just looks like you end up in an area of managed decline where like the people that face the most acute tough choices are in the division that was supposed to be doing investigation of administration stuff and, like, all this other stuff over here. Like, you're fine if you're investigating Facebook still or investigating you big banks, right? So, like, some of that stuff over there is still gonna, like, continue while the rest of this stuff, you know, gets. Gets shoved off. And it's. It's tough. It's a tough one. Well, anyway, there you go. You're good here. No worries at the Bulwarks. Subscribe to the. Subscribe to the feed. We ain't going anywhere, and we'll be back here soon, so we'll see you then. Peace.